The Tale of Tales

by Giambattista Basile

  FAB.: May their seed be lost! Masked men, who live to pull the wool over our eyes: on the outside they’re Narcissus and on the inside the demon himself!

  IAC.: Now listen as I tell you of a woman who’ll take whoever comes or goes. You see a little doll, a lovely and lavish thing, a dove, a mirror, a jewel, a painted egg, a Fata Morgana,29 a round full moon; she’s as pretty as a picture, you could drink her up in a glass of water, she’s a morsel fit for a lord, a little lass who steals away hearts. She ties you up with her tresses, she takes you out of circulation with her eyes, she does you in with her voice. But when she’s thrown into the crucible, oh, what fire you see! So many snares and traps, ambushes and trafficking, tangles and webs! She prepares a thousand birdlimes, she throws out a thousand nets, she invents a thousand ruses, a thousand traps and schemes, lures and stratagems, mines and countermines, and entanglements and disentanglements. She pulls like a hook, lets blood like a barber, swindles like a gypsy, and a thousand times you think she’s bubbly wine when she’s really infected meat! When she speaks she plots and when she walks she weaves; when she laughs she spins intrigue and when she touches you it stains. And even if she doesn’t send you to the hospital, you’re treated like a bird or an animal, since her accursed dagger leaves you either without feathers or without fur!30

  FAB.: If you put what you said on paper, you could sell this story31 for six coins a copy,32 for it offers a fine example of how men should take care to be on the lookout and not hand themselves over to those women of ill repute, since they’re false coin and the ruin of both the meat and the sauce.

  IAC.: If by chance you notice someone at a window who seems to be a fairy, with blond hair that looks like braids of caciocavallo,33 a forehead like a mirror, eyes that speak to you, and you see, in short, two lips like slices of prosciutto, a real bombshell of a girl, tall and as well displayed as a banner: no sooner have your eyes alit on her than you die into a faint, you suffer agonies and are done for! Idiot, good-for-nothing! Make sure you test her in the crucible, for you’ll find that what looks like a lavish beauty is a painted-over crapper, a whitewashed wall, a mask from Ferrara,34 since a true bride hangs out her tapestries:35 her braids are fake, her eyelashes dyed with soot from the stove and her face reddened with more than one pot of minium, and limewater and varnish besides; she preens, makes herself up, decks herself out, paints herself, and smears the stuff all over! She’s all gotten up and full of creams, all rags and little jars, powders and little bottles, so that with such an apparatus it looks like she’s planning to medicate some wounds! How many, how very many defects are covered by her skirts and slips! And besides, if she takes off her pattens,36 with their endless insoles and padding, you’ll see a giant turn into a dwarf!

  FAB.: My word, you’re making yourself clearer by the minute! I’m about to turn into a mummy; I’m amazed, I’m beside myself! Every pronouncement, brother, that you spit out is worth a zillion scudos! You can beat on all those things you’ve said with a maul and you won’t budge a hair from that ancient proverb that goes, “A woman is like a chestnut: beautiful on the outside, rotten on the inside.”

  IAC.: Let’s move on to the merchant, who makes change and exchanges, insures sailing vessels and finds clients, who trafficks, plots, and swindles, bribes tax collectors, buys in lots and then rakes in the profits. He builds ships and constructs houses; he fills his sewers to the brim, decorates his house like a bride, puts on a display worthy of a count, rustles silk, and doles it out left and right, supporting manservants and free women; and everyone holds him in envy. Wretched soul, if he is put in the crucible! For his wealth hangs in the air, his fortune is founded on smoke, a glassy fortune exposed to a thousand winds and at the mercy of the waves! Lovely in appearance, but your eyes are deceived; and just when you see him inundated by coins as shiny as a horse’s harness,37 he loses the whole game for a little mistake.

  FAB.: I can count them by the thousands. They’ve destroyed entire houses, their riches vanish into thin air—now you see it, now you don’t!—and what they do in this world, with no regard and entirely lacking in feeling for their third or fourth heirs, is to leave a full pot of soup and an empty will!

  IAC.: Here we have the lover: he believes the hours he spends and squanders in the service of Love to be happy ones. The flames and chains are sweet to him; the arrow that pierces him because of a great beauty is dear to him. He confesses that he craves death and barely manages to live; he calls suffering joy, delirium and torment amusement, heartbreak and lovesickness pleasure. He eats no meal that brings him benefit, gets no sleep that is worth anything: half-baked sleep and meals without gusto. Though he earns no pay he patrols outside the beloved doors, though he is no architect he makes sketches and builds castles in the air, and though he is no executioner he tortures his own life without end. But in spite of all this he is overjoyed and grows fat, and the more that dart pricks and pokes him, the more lard he puts on; the more the fire cooks him, the more he parties and plays, and he considers it his most felicitous fortune to be knotted tight by a rope! But if you put him in the crucible, you’ll realize there’s a substratum of madness, a sort of consumption, a state ever uncertain between fear and hope, ever suspended between doubt and suspicion, a never-ending state like that of Mister Basile’s cat,38 who cries one minute and laughs the next! He walks with great difficulty and as if he’s lost; he speaks in mumbles and stutters; he sends his brain out to pasture at all hours; and at every moment he has a heart like a rag, a face like a freshly laundered cloth, a heated breast, and a frozen soul. And even if he finally warms the ice and chips away at the stone of the one he loves, she who is nearest to him when she is farthest away, he no sooner tastes the sweetness than he repents!

  FAB.: Oh, miserable is he who meets up with these headaches! Wretched he who gets his foot caught in this trap! For that Blind One sends pleasures by the handful and torments by the arm’s length.

  IAC.: And the poor poet sends out floods of octaves and mouthfuls of sonnets, and demolishes paper and ink; he dries up his brain and consumes his elbows and his time, and only because people in this world consider him an oracle. He walks around like one possessed, strained and in a daze, thinking of the conceits he kneads in his imagination; he talks to himself in the street, finding thousands and thousands of new turns of phrase: “towering pupils, liquid surmounting of flowers and fronds, funereal and stridulous waves, animated pyropes of lubricious hope,” “oh, such immoderate presumption!”39 But if he is put to the test of the crucible, everything goes up in smoke: “Oh, what a lovely composition!” and there it remains. “What a madrigal!” and it’s all wasted breath. And when he is sounded, the more verses he produces, the smaller the cut. He praises those who despise him, exalts those who trouble him, stores up eternal memories of those who have forgotten about him, and gives his labors to those who never give him a crumb. This is how he dissipates his life: singing for glory and crying for misery.

  FAB.: Indeed, the days of San Martino40 are past, when poets were raised on high! In this dark age, Maecenases41 are ground to bits; and in Naples, as elsewhere—and it makes me croak with pain—laurel comes after vegetable greens in line!

  IAC.: The astrologer, too, gets many, so very many questions from all sides. One wants to know if he’ll have a baby boy, another if it’s the propitious time, another if he’ll win the court case, and another if fate is working against him. One wants to know if his mistress is thinking of him; another if it’s going to thunder or if there will be an eclipse. And so he tells his tall tales, so many that it would take a bar to ward them off, and he guesses half of one right and is wrong on a hundred others. But inside this crucible you can see whether he’s powder or flour: he traces quadrants, but is long and wide; he draws houses, but has neither house nor fire. He shows his figures and uncovers ugly stories; he climbs up to the stars and finds himself with his ass on the ground; at last, in rags and tatters, all ribbons and shreds, his pa
nts fall down and then you see the most genuine astrology of all, for he shows you his astrolabe42 and its spheres!

  FAB.: You make me laugh, brother, even if I’m not in the mood! But those who believe these people make me laugh even harder, until my sides split, since they presume to make predictions for others, and they can’t even predict what’s about to land on top of them: while they’re gazing at the stars they fall into a ditch!43

  IAC.: Someone else thinks he’s a big shot,44 and he pulls the wrinkles out of his socks and measures his words and spits roundly, and thinks he’s the best in the world. If you’re dealing with poetry he takes a standing jump and passes Petrarch by; if it’s philosophy he beats Aristotle by fifteen points and a foul;45 in arithmetic, Cantone’s no match for him; in the art of war, Cornazzano is fried; in architecture, Euclid go home! If it’s music he finds fault with Venosa; if it’s law he sends Farinaccio to his ruin; if it’s language he doesn’t give a shit about Boccaccio;46 he strings together judgments and skewers suggestions even if he’s not worth a thing at skittles. But if he’s put to the test it’s found, in conclusion, that he’s a ninny on a pile of books.

  FAB.: Oh, how beastly it is to presume too much! A good student used to say, “He who thinks he knows the most is the most ignorant.”

  IAC.: Where does that leave alchemy and the alchemist? He already considers himself content and esteems himself happy, and he promises even greater things in twenty or thirty years; he tells of stupendous things that he has found while distilling with his alembic, which he hopes will make him rich. But once he’s put in the crucible he’s chewed to pieces, and then you can see if his art is adulterated and just how blinded he is: he who, greasy and full of smoke, has placed the columns of his hope upon jars of glass and all of his thoughts and plans amid smoke; he who, while he fans the flames with his bellows, at the same time uses his words to feed the desire of those who wait for something that will never come. He goes hunting for secrets and is proclaimed to be mad; in search of the prime matter he loses his own form; he thinks he can multiply gold and diminishes what he has; he imagines he can cure diseased metals and ends up at the hospital himself. And instead of making quicksilver coagulate, so that it can be spent and is worth something, he curdles his own life; and while he thinks he is transforming every metal into the most refined gold, he transforms himself from a man into a horse.47

  FAB.: It is, without a doubt, madness to take on this enterprise! I’ve seen a hundred houses ruined, sunk to the bottom! Nothing ever comes of it, and desperate in his great hopes, he ever wanders, smoky and famished.

  IAC.: But tell me: what else do you want for three coins?48

  FAB.: Here I am with my mouth hanging open, ready to listen to you.

  IAC.: And I’d carry on all the way to the rosette.49

  FAB.: Keep on going then, now that you’re in the mood.

  IAC.: I would, if my soul weren’t on edge, since dinner time has already passed! So let’s beat it out of here, and come, if it pleases you, to my shop, and we’ll get our choppers going, for “there’s never a lack of crusts at a poor man’s house.”

  The words of this eclogue were accompanied by such graceful gestures and lovely twists of the mouth that you could have pulled the teeth of everyone who was listening.50 And since the crickets were calling the people to retire, the prince dismissed the women on the condition that they come the next morning to continue their enterprise, and he and the slave retired into his chambers.

  End of the first day.

  II

  THE SECOND DAY

  Dawn had come out to grease the wheels of the Sun’s coach, and, after the effort of removing the grass from the hubs of the wheel with a stick, became as red as a summer apple. Then Tadeo got out of bed, and after a good long stretch he called the slave and they got dressed in four snaps and then went down to the garden, where they found that the ten women had already arrived. And after he had four fresh figs picked for each of them, figs that with their pauper’s skin, hanged man’s neck, and whore’s tears1 made everyone’s mouth water, a thousand games2 commenced so that the time left before eating might be deceived. And they overlooked neither Anca Nicola;3 nor the Wheel of Kicks;4 nor Watch Your Wife;5 nor Covalera;6 nor Buddy of Mine, I’m Wounded;7 nor Proclamation and Command;8 nor the Master Is Welcome;9 nor Little Swallow, My Little Swallow;10 nor Empty the Cask;11 nor Jump a Palm’s-Length;12 nor Stone in Your Lap;13 nor Fish in the Sea, Go After Him;14 nor Anola Tranola, Pizza Fontanola;15 nor King Macebearer;16 nor Blinded Cat;17 nor Lamp to Lamp;18 nor Hang My Curtain;19 nor Butt and Drum;20 nor Long Beam;21 nor the Little Hens; nor the Old Man Hasn’t Come;22 nor Empty the Barrel;23 nor Mammara and Hazelnut;24 nor Seesaw; nor the Outlaws;25 nor Argue the Case, Court Clerk;26 nor Come Out, Come Out;27 nor What’s in Your Hand, the Needle and Thread?;28 nor Bird, Bird, Sleeve of Iron;29 nor Greco Wine or Vinegar;30 nor Open the Door for the Poor Falcon.31

  But when the hour had arrived for them to fill their bellies32 they sat down at the table, and when they had eaten, the prince told Zeza to act the part of the valiant woman and start her tale. She had so many of them in her head that they were overflowing, and calling them all to order she chose the best one, which I’ll now tell you.

  1

  PETROSINELLA*

  First Entertainment of the Second Day

  A pregnant woman eats some parsley from an ogress’s garden, is caught in the act, and promises the ogress the offspring she is about to bear. She gives birth to Petrosinella, and the ogress takes her and locks her in a tower. A prince steals her away and with the help of three acorns they are able to flee from the danger of the ogress, and after Petrosinella is brought to her lover’s house she becomes a princess.

  “My desire to keep the princess happy is so great that all last night, when not a thing could be heard high or low, I did nothing but rummage in the old chests of my mind and search all the closets of my memory, choosing from among the things that the good soul of madam Chiarella Vusciolo, my uncle’s grandmother, used to tell—may she rest in God’s glory, and to your health!—the tales that seemed most appropriate to distribute to you one a day, those that, if I haven’t put my eyes on backward, I imagine will please you. And if they prove not to be squadrons that send the sorrows of your heart to certain defeat, they will at least be trumpets that give these fellow storytellers of mine a wake-up call to enter the battlefield with more transport than my poor forces allow me, so that the riches of their minds may compensate for the lackings of my own words.

  “There once was a pregnant woman named Pascadozia who, while sitting at a window that overlooked an ogress’s garden, noticed a lovely bed of parsley, for which she got such a craving that she felt she would faint. And so, not being able to resist, she kept close watch until the ogress went out, and then she picked a handful of it. But after the ogress came back home and wanted to make a sauce, she realized that a sickle had been at work and said, ‘May my neck snap if I don’t collar this thief and make him repent, so that he may learn to eat from his own cutting board and not to dip his spoon into the pot of others.’

  “But the poor pregnant woman continued to go down to the garden, until one morning she was caught by the ogress who, all angry and livid, said to her, ‘I’ve got you, you swindling thief! What, you think you pay rent on this garden, so that you can come with so little discretion and pinch my herbs? On my word, I’ll send you to Rome for your penance!’1 The unfortunate Pascadozia started to apologize, explaining that it wasn’t because she was a glutton or ravenous that the demon had blinded her and made her commit this sin, but because she was pregnant and afraid that the face of her newborn would be sown with parsley; in fact, the ogress should be grateful that Pascadozia hadn’t sent her a sty or two.2 ‘The bride wants more than just words!’ answered the ogress. ‘This chatter is no bait for me! You’re finished with the job of life if you don’t promise to give me the baby you’re going to have, and it m
atters not whether it’s a boy or a girl.’ To escape the dangerous situation in which she found herself, poor Pascadozia swore to this with one hand on the other, and the ogress let her go free.

  “When it came time to give birth Pascadozia bore a daughter so beautiful that she was a joy to behold, and she named her Petrosinella on account of the lovely little clump of parsley on her chest.3 Petrosinella grew a span every day, and when she was seven her mother sent her to a teacher. And whenever she was on the road and ran into the ogress, the ogress would say to her, ‘Tell your mother to remember the promise!’ And she bothered her about it so many times that one day the poor mother, who couldn’t bear to listen to this music any longer, said to her daughter, ‘If you run into the old woman again and she asks you about that damned promise, you answer her, “Take her!”’